No Blessing For Hospital Union

St. Bernard's On The South Side Is A Battleground As Unions Try To Extend Their Organizing Of Catholic Facilities.

At Christmas, St. Bernard Hospital and Health Care Center on Chicago's South Side handed out heaps of employee bonuses.

To Tom Brem, the problem was that they went to non-union workers, and he is still fuming.

"For the last three years they have done everything to get around or to violate the contract or to divide the workers," grumbled Brem, a veteran negotiator for Local 73 of the Service Employees International Union, which is fighting to continue to represent workers at the hospital.

Attorney Tom Luetkemeyer, who faces Brem across the bargaining table on behalf of the small Catholic hospital, calmly agrees that the hospital and union do not see eye to eye.

"We realize the union is out there and they represent the employees, but the hospital cannot just give them carte blanche," he said

The tensions between the 97-year-old hospital and the union are but one example of the confrontations that have been boiling up lately across the country between organized labor and Catholic-run health-care facilities.

Newly ambitious unions, hungry for new recruits in the rapidly consolidating health-care industry, are increasingly taking on Catholic-owned facilities in grim battles that seem as if they belong at steel mills, not at hospitals often run by orders of nuns like those at St. Bernard in Chicago's Englewood community.

It has become a far more complex union-business confrontation than usual, one almost on a par with a corrosive family dispute.

This battle is not unique to Catholic-run hospitals. Other religious orders and for-profit hospitals, pinched by pressure on revenues and rising costs, are embroiled in fights with unions seeking new members.

But the unions, whose ranks are filled with Catholics, say their facilities should abide by church teachings supporting the role of unions in society and operate on a different standard from other hospitals. To them, this means setting aside the barriers raised by most U.S. businesses to their organizing drives, and openly welcoming unions as friends of the workers.

So far, however, few Catholic-run facilities have done so. Their response is that they have to protect the workers, and unions may not have the workers' best interests in mind. And like administrators at Provena St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, who waited out a 61-day nurses strike in 1993, many have stood their ground.

Aside from the Joliet facility, the Illinois Nurses Association has not been able to get its foot inside another Catholic-run hospital.

When workers at St. John's Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis, that city's second-largest hospital, sought to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union last summer, for example, hospital officials openly opposed the effort.

"We wanted to maintain the relationship directly with our employees," said hospital spokesman Bill McShane. The union won the vote.

"Most Catholic facilities are going to feel that they have a right to assure that the workers have made an informed decision on unionization. But they are not going to say, `Well, the social justice teachings require us to sit down and negotiate.' That is not going to happen," said Larry Singer, a law professor and director of Loyola University's Center for Catholic Healthcare and Sponsorship.

But John Russo, a labor studies professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio, has criticized the fight some Catholic-run facilities have waged to keep unions out, asserting that the fight is often buoyed by high-priced firms that advise on how to defeat union election bids.

"What really is happening is that the labor relations of these organizations do not reflect Catholic social teaching," Russo said. "It seems like they [Catholic health-care leaders] are practicing a type of cafeteria Catholicism. They are picking and choosing what they want."

Catholic-run facilities, which now account for roughly 11 percent of the nation's 5,000 community hospitals, are a natural target for union organizing, because they have learned how to survive as well as expand through mergers and acquisitions in a brutally competitive market.

"It is a challenge both to organized labor and Catholic health care as to how to maneuver through these issues so that it doesn't end up to be divisive for the workplace environment or the communities Catholic hospitals are trying to serve," said the Rev. Michael Place, president and chief executive of the Catholic Health Association, which represents more than 600 Catholic hospitals.

Indeed, this drive comes at a critical time for these hospitals, which, like all facilities, face dwindling revenues as the federal government slows its spending on Medicare, the health insurance program for elderly and disabled people.

Concerned by the escalating tension, a group of Catholic leaders, Catholic health-care administrators and union leaders met under the auspices of the Catholic Bishops' Conference for over a year before offering guidelines last fall on how Catholic-run facilities should deal with unions.